Cui Bono: the Looming Contradiction Between Empire and Democracy

Cui Bono: The Looming Contradiction Between Empire and Democracy HONORS THESIS Presented to the Honors Committee of Texas State University—San Marcos in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation in the Mitte Honors Program By Ryan Jeffery Forrest San Marcos, Texas cui bono (kw b n ) n.-Utility, advantage, or self-interest considered as the determinant of value or motivation. [From Latin cui bon (est), for whom (it is) of advantage : cui, dative of qu , who + bon , dative of bonum, advantage.] American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd Ed. Forrest During the last five years, America has embarked on its final trek to global domination. The anxiously anticipated final trek began with acts of terror committed on American soil that brought about drastic changes in domestic security, set precedent for preemptive, preventative, or precautionary warfare, and reinvigorated the movement to dominate space. The motif of the acts of terror was exploited to garner fear and brandish power by haughtily making vulnerable an American working population. In the dawn of the twenty-first century, America fought wars of global domination. Though officially fought for liberation and the furtherance of democracy, the wars paradoxically stunted both. The leaders of empire, after the deaths of three thousand people in New York City, glutted their public with liberty-defying legislation and smothered disruptive protectorate states with carpet and saturation bombing, realizing imperial objectives without achieving the publicly pronounced aims of the wars. The trek to global domination was not an inevitable consequence of democratic pluralism, but rather the product of two and a quarter centuries of imperial ambition. This brief text will give a between-the-lines historical analysis of double-standard imperial policy coupled with shrewd North American statesmanship from the early seventeenth century to the present-day. 1 Forrest Colonialism to Revolution: Shrewd Statesmanship British hegemony in North America began in 1607 with the conquering of the American natives in much the same fashion as the Protestant-Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland in the mid-sixteenth century; plantations were built to insulate British planters from the savagery of the non- Protestant Irish and Indian tribes; the conquests displayed mercilessness in their sheer disregard and plunder of the conquered peoples; the terror of Indian barbarism, the savagery of the Irish, and British superciliousness provided the pretext for wars of domination. Just as the Crown pillaged and burned villages in Ireland, Indian tribes were subjected to the same sword and flame. The tribes in the areas of British North American conquest, unlike those in the Spanish domain of Mexico and Central America, were not sedentary and resisted enslavement, whereas those peoples conquered by Spain more readily accepted enslavement. British colonists were unable to enchain or subsist with the Indians, and systematically removed them. What remained a necessity then was labor on the rich-soiled plantations annexed by the wealthy British traders. By 1619, the poverty-ridden and imprisoned within Britain emigrated as indentured servants along with African slaves to constitute the working force and minority classes on the newly conquered land. New World profiteering provided Britain with the necessary resources to expand her realm of domination to all corners of the globe; the wealth of the American colonies set the groundwork for British imperial conquest. The Age of Enlightenment of the eighteenth century brought profound redefinition to the worldview of much of the Western world, and spurred revolution in the united American colonies, then in France, Haiti, and the Spanish colonies of Latin America. To incite mutiny among the working class, the leaders of the Revolution exploited the resentment of British American colonists toward the great disparity of wealth in favor of the British traders and landowners, shrewdly diverting attention from their own estates. Collectively rousing the British colonists in the United States, the Declaration of Independence condemned the terror and conspiracy of George III, a tyrant. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it …[A]ll men are created equal…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to 2 Forrest provide new guards for their future security.” The Revolution was incited and fought by aroused British colonists beside French, Prussian, black, and Indian warriors, and from the debris of war, an American aristocracy was born anew. Though Revolution was notionally fought in the interest of all men, those who would assume power in the aftermath of Revolution, the American Forefathers, were those that most capitalized on the new freedom from the Crown. The equality of protection and representation under the law was extended only to the self-made man of property; excluded were the propertyless, women, and colored folk of whichever stripe. Jefferson wrote of a “natural aristocracy;” Hamilton and Madison believed government to be the “guardian of elite values,” in which “legislators…would be chosen from the ranks of ‘gentlemen;’” (Judis, 26) John Jay said that the people that own the country ought to run it. Though promoting a polity of equality, the slaver founders saw to it that the ante-bellum caste system was maintained. Independence from Britain was but a nominal transition of the aristocracy joint with the invention of liberty and certain unalienable rights. 3 Forrest Independence to Civil War: Callow Imperial Statesmanship After independence was won, among the chief aims of the new country was commercial and territorial expansion. War Chief Washington, the “Town Destroyer,” set out in 1779 against the savage Iroquois along the Great Lakes to “extirpate them from the country.” (Mintz, 76) Jefferson, who wrote after Independence that “America has a hemisphere to itself,” (LaFeber, 22) broadened the domain of democracy in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase from Bonaparte in the largest single expanse of American territory: 828,000 square miles for $1 million. Though no rationale was given for the financing of Bonaparte’s Terror in Europe, the incorporation of the French, blacks, and Creoles of Louisiana into the Union without their consent was also a banal matter of expansionist policy; Jefferson told Madison that the Creoles were “as incapable of self-government as children…the less we say about constitutional difficulties respecting Louisiana the better, and what is necessary for surmounting them must be done sub silentio.” (Paterson, 60) Whereas the Virginia dynasty and the Northern Federalists first dominated American politics in the early days of the democracy, Judis writes, “[p]olitical parties and elections first became important during the 1820s,” when “states eliminated property tests for voting, [and] the parties became local and national organizations.” (5; emphasis added) These parties were powerful enough that they “doled out government jobs through patronage and controlled local newspapers.” (6) This party system, born in the 1820s, reigned until the Civil War. This half- century brought about invention and industry, an ever-expanding commercial capacity, and the pride of democracy, capitalism, and the labor force that fueled it, grew and required expansion. Shrewd statesmanship won the Floridas from Spain by way of the Adams-Onís treaty of 1821, which also extended US territory to the Pacific. In 1823, President Monroe claimed hemispheric hegemony with his annunciation of the Monroe Doctrine, without the power to enforce it. For example, European creditors, England and France, brought armed force on the Falkland Islands and Mexican ports in the 1830s, but US policymakers did nothing. In any event, the doctrine had been set down in 1823 to be invoked in future interventions in order to preserve and insure US interests across the hemisphere, and eventually beyond. Andrew Jackson, president and war hero, was cheered for playing shepherd on the Trail of Tears, when he transmigrated thousands of Indians from their land in Florida. Of course estimates of mortality along the Trail differ, but a reasonable estimate would approximate 100,000 Indians 4 Forrest transported, and perhaps a third who died on course. With this translocation, the US had expanded and exterminated along the entire eastern seaboard, ever broadening the domain of democracy. President Polk in the 1840s brought about an even wider expanse of democracy. In 1845, Polk invoked the Monroe Doctrine to claim US rights to Texas, California, and Oregon, but only after a fabricated event on Mexican soil that had been orchestrated by the Polk Administration. The event, instigated by US provocateurs on then-Mexican territory, was deliberately misconstrued as involving militant Mexicans on US soil; it was a lie. The US public was plunged into an enormous and unconstitutional land grab by the hands of a self-confident American elite, which brought the death and theft of people, land, and resources, while continentally expanding US influence and democracy by way of an illegally instigated act of war, which

Load more